


Mother of Ravagers

by HomunculusJim



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Cartoon), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alien Biology, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Love Triangles, M/M, Merry doesn't die, Mostly Gen, Mpreg, Multi, Peter has superpowers, Plot, Polyamory, Pretending to be Human, Secret Identity, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, Team as Family, Threesome - F/M/M, Undercover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-02-03 22:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12756993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HomunculusJim/pseuds/HomunculusJim
Summary: It all went swimmingly until they crash-landed on Terra.When an acquisition job goes awry, Yondu and the gang find themselves trapped on a primitive mudball with enemies all around them and no foreseeable means of escape. Their only option? Blend in with the locals.In which Kraglin has a secret, Yondu has anger issues, and Peter Quill takes after his father. Meredith Quill just wants a normal life, free of aliens, cancer, and her son's newfound superpowers - but when has the universe ever been that kind?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A warning, for those who skimmed the tags: this fic will contain mpreg in a lateral sort of way, although the plot focuses primarily on the Ravagers as they learn to pass as human. The endgame pairing is Kraglin/Meredith/Yondu, although there's a lot of Kragdu and Meredu separately. Mostly story, some ship.

**Kraglin**

 

He ran.

 

A hundred different names, a thousand different places. He indulged in a spot of idle bounty-hunting, toiled on the ice freighters that chased down comets and carved out their frigid cores. As for false identities, he shed them at every port: herring-trails crisscrossing the quadrant like laser-mesh in a bank vault.

 

Rockhopping, they called it. It was too simple a word. How could 'rockhopping' encompass this: the constant motion, the itch of danger under his skin?

 

Sometimes, it wasn't a run at all. More a walk, actually – a dismal trudge through back alleys lined with trash bags and Upkick needles and the remains of impromptu organ surgery. He eked out an existence on planets which, like him, verged on the cusp of extinction. He felt a kinship with them: the old miner colonies whose surfaces had been destabilized by repeated open-cast blasting; skylines choked by munitions factories, which churned out canon after canon, bomb after bomb, fuel for the ongoing Kree-Xandarian war.

 

Other times he zipped along at lightspeed. It all depended on how easy unattended ships were to jack, and how long they ran on depleted fuel reserves. His past snapped at his heels like the Eumenides. Behind were those who knew who he was. Those who knew  _what_ he was. They were coming, and they'd hound him to the ends of the galaxy and beyond.

 

Kraglin Obfonteri – the name on his latest ID chip - didn't know where he was going, but he was on his way. Every day was a stop-gap, every rest temporary. He could run, but he could never, ever stop.

 

The recruitment holoposter outside the Contraxian flophouse shivered and glitched. Pixels sizzled, sparks snapping under leaky guttering. Kraglin was still running, as he slouched to the bar and grunted his greeting to the men there: four of them, three pink and one blue, all with the same flame patch stitched on their sleeves. Just in a slightly different direction.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Meredith**

 

 

 ****Dying took a lot out of you.

 

It was all kinds of unfair. Fate robbed her of the last fifty years of her life (give or take a decade). By rights, her remaining months should be spent dancing and singing and sprinting naked through the Missouri woods, blasting _Brandy_ from her car radio, buying double-portions at Dairy Queen, and smoking a helluva lot of pot.

 

But Meredith had matured. Or so she'd reassured her pa eight years ago, as she cradled the curve of her belly and told him yes, she was keeping it; no, she hadn't heard from the father; and no, neither he nor Pastor Milton got an opinion.

 

Anyway.

 

Gone were those sun-spangled days of drifting from foxhole to foxhole, herb smoke clinging to the dozy curl of her smile. The days of tuning old guitars by ear, plucking out _Spanish Ladies_ for the grizzled patrons at the biker bar where she'd waitressed from sixteen to twenty-six.

 

No. If she had the energy, Meredith Quill would pour every remaining moment into mothering her son.

 

Peter sat at her bedside, a befreckled and miserable lump of boy. His sneakered feet kicked inches off the floor. The headphones had grudgingly been peeled from his ears; they dangled around his neck, their foam pads a splash of color in an otherwise dismal room. His backpack, heavier with the weight of one neatly wrapped-and-boxed mixtape, was muddy. It bore the tell-tale bronzes and peaty blacks of woodland soil. His black eye puffed like a fungus, filling one side of his face, and snot coated his lip, smeared up his cheek from where he'd used his sleeve instead of a hankie.

 

He was hers. The only good mark she'd left on this world. She loved him with a fierce intensity, a roaring cascade of affection. It couldn't be expressed using a voice that crackled like a tape on its last rewind, or a hand speckled with IV-bruises, blood puddling like liverspots under her frail white skin.

 

“Take my hand,” she begged. But Peter was a little boy, and when little boys were scared, they ran.

 

Merry understood that. She wished she could run too. But there was no outrunning the ebb of her organs, the sluggish churn of her heart. There was only one inevitability for mortals (so Ego told her once, as she lay her head on his lap under the tree where they'd met, and watched his alien flower grow). And that inevitability was death.

 

There was even a bright white light. It was all very Sunday School. She half-expected a sepulchral choir – or perhaps for Pastor Milton to slink from the side-lines and scold her for skipping her prayers.

 

Meredith was a good Christian girl from a good Christian family (so long as you overlooked the bag of herbs in the shoebox behind her wardrobe, and her minor arrest record). But she hadn't hailed Mary in a very long time. For years, in fact. Not since the doctor pushed his glasses up his sweaty snub of a nose, and gestured to the chair.

 

 _If you'd take the seat, Ms Quill,_ he quavered, shuffling his papers so he had an excuse not to look her in the eye. _I'm afraid you're going to need it._

 

Meredith didn't sit. She listened to the doctor's sermon on her own two feet, nodding in all the right places, sucking her lips until they dug into her teeth.

 

That morning, she had scheduled an appointment to complain about a persistent headache. She was grateful that they could slip her in after the school run and groceries. She left with an x-ray, the results of every blood test under the sun, and some godawful news, the beat of her shopping bag off her calf as numb as her heart.

 

But it was okay. Ego said he'd be back for her. He was a king from another planet, an angel made of pure light. Merry knew it, and she'd never been ashamed to say so. She was in love with a spaceman: a magical, mystical, fairy-tale prince.

 

The doctors blamed her stories on the tumor. A common side-effect, they claimed.

 

The mass exerted pressure on the surrounding tissue, corrupting her thoughts and warping her memories like gravity around a star. It was a slow evanescence, according to them, and if she was lucky, she would die before she forgot her own son's name.

 

But the doctors didn’t know squat.

 

Her boy was Peter. Peter Jason Quill. Her little Star-Lord. Each and every one of her memories was as clear as the crystal ring Ego had promised her, hewn from quasar-diamond, as soon as he returned from his trip.

 

Merry slid through life in reverse. The years peeled from her like petals off the rose in her favorite Disney film. Shadows advanced. They encased her in an inky ice block ( _do not go gently into that good night)_ and she decked the grim reaper right in his skeletal grin and _screamed_ because she had a son, dammit, a beautiful, marvellous son _(rage, rage against the dying of the light_ ) and she loved him and she would never leave him, and she wouldn't let him grow up without a mother, she _refused,_ and...

 

Somebody was holding her hand.

 

“I'm sorry, mom.”

 

Peter.

 

He sounded like he was crying. Even in the depths of delirium, his tears cut her to the soul.

 

Her boy was _crying._ He needed her. She couldn't leave him, not yet.

 

“I'm sorry, mom. I'm sorry I ran. I didn't mean to, I'm back now. Please don't die. Please.”

 

A child’s fingers clasped her own. They were so much smaller than Ego's. Slighter, more fragile. But they were hotter too, like fresh-fired buckshot. And through their touch, Meredith felt...

 

Light.

 


	2. Chapter 2

You didn't _feel_ light, of course. You felt heat.

 

Merry remembered that from her physics lessons. What a shame it was, that she'd never pursued that interest. But she was a girl and girls didn't do science. Anyway, there was too much music to blast and pot to hotbox, through the long and languid Summer of Love...

 

She had to stop getting distracted. Had to stop drifting. Had to focus on the here and now, on life, on _Peter._

 

She had to focus on the light.

 

It wasn't light by any scientific definition. Not that of the pearly complexion either: the light Pastor Milton threatened Merry would never see if he caught her sharing cigarette kisses with a girl behind the chapel again, and...

 

No. Don't think about her.

 

The light, the light. She had to focus on the light.

 

What made it different? It was brighter, for a start. And blue, bluer than anything she'd ever seen. Electric as the crackle of a lightning storm. Her curiosity was a bridge. A conduit opened between her body and the source. Tendrils of it spliced to her neurons, connecting her to something much larger than herself.

 

Meredith Quill fitted.

 

Gasped.

 

_Lived._

 

She opened her eyes. Grandpapa and her aunties cowered in the corner, braced against the glare. And there, in the midst of the brilliance, his eyes plastered shut, chin wobbling and tears streaking his blotchy cheeks...

 

Oh, it was him. The light of her life, her perfect son, her little Star-lord.

 

Meredith, being of a petty disposition (despite her best efforts) took a moment to direct a heartfelt 'fuck you' at her doctor. So much for this being her last day on earth. It seemed someone took after his daddy.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**Yondu**

 

 

There were moments in every man's life when he realized that he had utterly and irrevocably fucked up.

 

A one-time occurrence could be blamed on coincidence; two on misfortune.

 

Three, however? That was when a man had to take a long, hard look at himself, and accept the blame he was due.

 

First: he stood before the tribunal long enough for Stakar to proclaim that he should've left him where he found him: a feral thing in a cage, snapping at every touch.

 

Second: he had to confront what a part of him always knew – the part that wasn't fooled by the doddery old god who wanted to meet his offspring, because _shouldn't every child grow up loved?_

 

And, third... Well, thirds were always worst. That was the way of the galaxy. This was no different.

 

As a ping buzzed onto his PADD (which lay amid shards of its own screen from where Yondu dashed it against the wall), the youngest and most short-lived captain of a Ravager galleon staggered out of the bathroom holding a piss-soaked strip.

 

He made it halfway to the waste processor before falling to his knees and taking out his frustration on the floor.

 

Crash, crash, crash.

 

When knuckles met metal, metal invariably won.

 

There was a time when this would've been endurance training. Yondu spent years methodically cracking every bone in his hands, a million microfractures that healed into something more durable than nature intended.

 

That was how battle slave training worked. Break a man a little and he came back stronger. Break a man a lot; he either died or adapted. A better tool, a better machine, a better weapon.

 

Yondu adapted.

 

Yondu always, always adapted. He adapted to the rubrics of the gladiatorial ring, to the blood-lusty roars of spectators around the Colosseum. To the snapping of his collar and Stakar Ogord's warm hands on his shoulders; the light of a star in his eyes; the way his hairy chest shuddered and his face contorted like he was furious when he fucked.

 

And now he had to adapt again.

 

The strip in his hand cooled gradually. Yondu knelt over the bloodstained dent, metal contorted around the shape of his throbbing hand. The fans cycled unhurriedly, immune to his fury. They swilled cool, rust-tasting air through the room.

 

Yondu smelled urine, sharp and foxy. It overpowered the stink of booze, which glugged from the bottle he'd knocked over on the way, and the fumes from an old pair of socks, which had been languishing on his floor since long before his exile. But none of those stenches were nearly as nauseating as what Yondu now knew.

 

_Hell._

 

At the end of the day, he only had one option, and that was to destroy the evidence. Yondu hurled the stick at the nearest waste chute with all the strength he had.

 

It pinged off the wall at an angle. Miraculously, he clipped it into the hole rather than sending it skittering under his bed to molder until the next time that new rookie, Obfon-whassisface, fucked up enough to justify being handed a mop. If Ob-fon-fairy hadn't already deserted, of course.

 

Yondu waited on the grind of the pulverizer and the suck of the pneumatic disposal tube beyond. There. Problem solved.

 

In the corner, the PADD continued to pleep. Light glanced off the glass shards, covering the ceiling in fractal shapes.

 

 _Incoming message,_ intoned the voice. _Sender: Ego._

 

And just like that, Yondu's horrible no-good very-bad day got that little bit worse.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**Meredith**

 

 

Peter didn't let go of her hand. He pulled her to her feet instead.

 

Her legs were weedy twigs. They looked too thin to hold her, and felt it too. And yet, hold her they did, and Meredith, for the first time in months, stood on her own two feet.

 

She trembled – from excitement and cold and just a touch of terror. Any mother would feel fear when her son channelled forces beyond her wildest imagination. (Well. Maybe not _beyond_ it; Merry’s was wilder than most. But it was still pretty darn incredible.)

 

“C'mon, mom,” he whispered. “Let's go.”

 

They went.

 

Peter led her along bland green hospital corridors. Merry stumbled as she recalled how to balance, how to roll her hips rather than hobbling stiff-legged.

 

They passed wards with twee little names like _Gooseberry_ and _Pumpernickel._ Empty ranks of wheelchairs were folded on themselves like desks in an exam hall. The night bore down on them through the skylights, oppressive and steamy after the bake of a midsummer day.

 

Now the human population was sleeping, with the exception of the night nurse (who hastily stuffed her comfort bottle back in her drawer as the pair passed by), nature had infiltrated these sterile-swabbed walls. Flies battered themselves against the light casings, moths fluttering in the sluggish trickle of breeze through the vent. The nasal drone of the ‘skeeters was almost as loud as the chirring grasshoppers outside.

 

Meredith concentrated on placing one bare foot in front of the other. She measured her breathing to her pace and her pace to the checkerboard linoleum, gown sticking to fever-sweat like clingfilm.

 

It was open-backed. Now, Meredith was no stranger to skinny-dipping - but it was still a touch mortifying when you were being paraded along by your eight-year-old son.

 

Merry held her gown so as to maintain a modicum of mystery.

 

“Where we goin', baby?” she whispered.

 

Peter's little hand blazed, feeding warmth and life back into her. He seemed just as afraid to let go as she was.

 

“Outside,” he replied, voice a high quaver. Bright wisps fluttered between his lips. Meredith tasted static.

 

“Why we goin' outside?” she tried, as they stepped through the silent cafeteria.

 

His sneakers squeaked on the tiles. They were cold as an ice sheet on her toes, and she thought back to her father, crouched on the floor, a barricade between his sisters and the light.

 

An aura of finality shrouded the cafeteria doors, lit green by the Emergency Exit sign. Once they passed them, Merry’s gut told her, there was no going back.

 

Peter was adamant, however. Merry dug her heels in, just for a moment, and found herself dragged.

 

“Peter!”

 

Her voice cut through the ambient hum of insects and the plip from the kitchen sink. Peter froze.

 

“M-mommy?”

 

“Why do you want to go outside, Peter?” She couldn't explain it, but dread curdled inside her like out-of-date cream. “What's out there, honey?”

 

Peter frowned. “Daddy,” he said. Then he let go of her hand.

 

His fingers left tingling pink pressure marks. If Meredith looked closely she could see static dancing between the pores. But she didn't care about that, not when her son took a step away from her, wobbling from sneaker to sneaker. Then another. Then another, and another again.

 

Oh, hell no. No more clinging to what she knew: her father, her memories, the small sunny town where she'd been born and raised, and had fully expected to die. If Peter was going to step out there, into the unknown chasms of the midnight sky, like hell was he going alone.

 

“Wait for me, Peter,” she said. And, pushing open the door, Peter did.

 

He stood there, straddling the threshold, one toe on tile and the other brushing the dew-jewelled grass. Street lamps glowed in the distance, traffic lights changing for no one in the silent town. The night sky had never looked so heavy to Meredith, as if it might come crashing down on her head.

 

"Mommy?" Peter held out his hand to her.

 

Merry licked her cracked, vomit-tasting lips. _No going back._

 

"I'm here," she said, and took it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been forever, and for that you have my apologies. I hope you enjoyed this chapter regardless. Yes, Stakar is Yondu's baby-daddy. Cue drama.

**Author's Note:**

> I greatly appreciate kudos and comments. It'd also be lovely if you read my other fic - _King and Lionheart._ That's another multi-chapter, albeit considerably more M-rated than this one. It will feature a very intense dom/sub Yondu x Kraglin relationship. If you're interested, you should check it out.


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